Page 17 of Inkpot Gods

“Relax! I was just kidding.” She’s laughing now, and still laughing as she offers Lilianne her hand, this time to shake, not pull her off the ground. “I’m Smita. It’s nice to meet you…?”

“Lilianne,” says Lilianne hurriedly, and she’s never been so glad to have chosen something easy to pronounce, something that rolls trippingly off the tongue, as Shakespeare put it. She knows too many girls with multisyllabic names they stole from anime that had been meaningful to them before their eggs cracked, and she can’t imagine getting one of those names out with stumbling over it right now. (She knows even more girls named “Crystal,” which is basically the “Taylor” of the trans set. Fortunately, it never called to her. She always knew she was going to be a flower, just like Asphodel. Just like the woman who showed her the way.)

“Lilianne,” says Smita, smiling.

Lilianne swears on the spot that she will never change her name, never accept a nickname (apart from “Lily,” which was the whole reason she chose the name to begin with) from anyone else. It’s poetry on Smita’s lips. It’s a prayer. And the god that’s being prayed to must love her very much, or she wouldn’t be here to hear the prayer as it’s spoken.

Smita doesn’t say anything after that, just raises an eyebrow, clearly waiting, and Lilianne realizes she needs to speak. That’s how conversations work, isn’t it? Both parties have to participate, or there’s not really a conversation going on, just a handful of words that will fade all too soon to silence.

“I, uh, sorry,” says Lilianne. “I’m new here—which you knew. I’m from Alabama, originally. My parents are still there. I’m here to get my PhD in American history, with a focus on early American children’s literature. It was the best way to thread the needle between English and history, and I felt like I needed both of them if I was going to be anything like happy. I, uh. Are you a student here?”

She can’t possibly be so lucky. This living goddess must be a professor, or a visitor, or something else that means Lilianne is never going to see her again after this moment inevitably ends. She’s fallen in love at first sight before—a natural risk for a queer girl in small-town Alabama, where her options were limited even before she started registering them, where it was safer to keep her head down and her heart tucked away from prying eyes. She’s never fallen in love like this, where it’s so solid that it feels like she’s breathing around a rock, like it’s weighing her down and choking her at the same time. She can’t breathe for all this love. She can’t breathe, and she can’t spit it out, no matter how much she wants to—and she doesn’t really want to.

She is in love with Smita, and she wants to be in love forever, and she knows she won’t be able to hold on to this feeling for much longer, so she’s going to do whatever she can to make it last while she can.

Smita is smiling and nodding like Lilianne just asked a perfectly reasonable question, rather than vomiting words all over her. “I am. Still,” she says. “I’ve been here awhile now, and I’m in biogenetics. I’m trying to identify a variety of biological markers that may serve as warning signs for various genetic conditions and lineages. It’s all very complicated—I won’t blame you if you don’t understand it. Sometimes I’m not sure that I understand it.”

Lilianne blinks. “You must be really, really smart,” she says.

Smita laughs. “I don’t know that I’d describe it like that,” she says. “So what brings you to Berkeley?”

The real answer isn’t something she can expect anyone halfway reasonable to believe, and the backup answer isn’t one she’s willing to give to this goddess made flesh. For right now, she wants to exist in a world where Smita is perfect, and not a world where she’s had the chance to show herself as flawed as any other human.

“I got accepted for the research year,” she says. “I was studying at the University of Alabama before, and that was a great school, very solid. I just needed to get out of the South for a little while, you know?”

“I do,” agrees Smita. “Sometimes the only thing you need more than a hug and a hot beverage is a change of scene. I guess coastal California is about as far from the South as you can get, hey?”

“This isn’t coastal.”

“Not in the technical sense, but we can be standing on the shore of the Pacific in just a few hours. Take the BART to San Francisco, catch a cable car or rent a bike, and there you are, looking at the waves rolling in. It’s a really nice day trip. You should take it some time.”

“Are you not from California?”

“Nope,” says Smita. “I grew up in Seattle, even closer to the ocean than we are here. I was at the beach every other weekend.”

“Why only every other?”

“I was at the library the rest of the time.” Smita’s eyes widen fractionally as she finishes speaking, and she leans around Lilianne to wave to someone she’s just spotted. “Erin! Over here!”

Lilianne turns to see who Smita’s waving at, and watches as another ridiculously attractive woman half-jogs over to join them. She’s curved and muscular where Smita is lithe and soft, with strawberry-blonde hair and a peaches-and-cream complexion that any Hollywood star would kill their stylist for. A dusting of freckles covers the bridge of her nose, and her eyes are an impossible shade of blue that Lilianne immediately dismisses as colored contacts.

She’s too pretty. Smita’s prettiness is earnest and honest. This woman’s prettiness feels more like a lure, like the shiny light an anglerfish dangles in front of its prey before it swallows them whole. Lilianne clutches her books a little tighter, ready to turn and run if the moment demands it.

“Are you all right?” asked the newcomer—asks Erin—as she slows to a stop next to Smita. She doesn’t appear to have noticed Lilianne yet. There’s still time to run.

“Just chatting with my new friend Lilianne,” says Smita.

Time’s up. Erin swivels to look at Lilianne with those blue, blue eyes, and it’s all Lilianne can do not to squirm like a moth pinned to a specimen board. If she had wings, they’d be beating frantically to signal her escape right about now, she knows that much without the need to think about it.

“Hello,” says Erin, with surprising caution. She’s standing so that her body is positioned between Lilianne and Smita, a perfect wall of flesh and bone and sinew. There’s nothing coastal about her voice. She sounds like the Midwest made flesh, like the cornfields of Ohio and the rolling Kansas wheat, all of it somehow pressed flat and given flesh, here in the form of a wary blonde college student. “I’m Erin. It’s nice to meet you.”

It makes sense that Erin should be cautious. If Lilianne had a girlfriend who looked like Smita, she’d be cautious all the time.

For a day that started with such absolute conviction, it certainly has devolved into a series of ifs, hasn’t it? The thought is amusing enough that Lilianne is able to summon up a smile as she extends her hand toward Erin. “A pleasure,” she agrees.

“Lilianne’s studying American history,” says Smita.

“What do you study?” Lilianne asked.